Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy (Gallagher Girls) Page 9

  Okay, I have to admit at that point my spy genetics and teenage curiosity were about to overwhelm me.

  Through my comms unit, I heard Mr. Solomon say, “Two men are playing chess in the southwest corner of the square. How many moves from checkmate is the man in the green cap, Ms. Baxter?”

  Bex replied “Six” without even breaking stride as she and Grant strolled along the opposite side of the street.

  “What do you mean? Why can’t you tell me?”

  “Just trust me, Gallagher Girl.” He straightened on the gazebo steps, placed his elbows on his knees, and something more substantial than a quarter seemed to pass between us as he stared at me. “Can you trust me?”

  A torn and faded movie ticket blew across the grass. Mr. Solomon said, “Ms. Morrison, you just passed three parked cars on Main Street; what were their tag numbers?” and Mick rattled off her response.

  But Zach’s gaze never left mine and I thought his question might have been the hardest of them all.

  In the reflection of the pharmacy window I saw Eva drop the quarter in the open bag at Courtney’s feet while, through my comms unit, Mr. Solomon warned, “There was an ATM behind you, Ms. Alvarez. ATMs equal cameras. Tighten it up, ladies.”

  Zach nodded and said, “Solomon’s good.” As if it didn’t go without saying.

  “Yeah. He is.”

  “They say you’re good, too.” And then, despite some very rigorous P&E training, I think a feather could have knocked me over, because A) I had no idea who “they” were or where they got their information. And B) Even if it was reliable intel, I never dreamed Zachary Goode, of all people, would say so.

  “Okay, Zach,” Mr. Solomon said. “Without turning around, tell me how many windows overlook the square from the west side.”

  “Fourteen.” Zach didn’t miss a beat. His eyes didn’t leave me for a second. Then to me he said, “They say you’re a real pavement artist.”

  Zach leaned back on the steps again. “You know, it’s probably a good thing we got to tail you in D.C. If you’d been following me, I probably never would have seen you.”

  It was supposed to be a compliment—I know it was. After all, for a spy, there’s probably no higher praise. But right then, as I stood in the place where I’d had my first date—my first kiss—I didn’t hear it as a spy; I heard it as a girl. And for a girl, having a boy like Zach Goode tell you that he would never notice you isn’t a compliment. At all.

  I should have said something sassy. I should have made a joke. I should have done anything but turn around and walk away from the gazebo and my partner and my mission. Bex and Grant veered onto the sidewalk and headed straight toward me. I felt Bex bump into me, heard her say “I’m sorry” as her hand slid softly over my own.

  “Nice pass, Ms. Baxter,” Mr. Solomon said as I held the quarter in my palm.

  I turned down a side street on the far side of the square, passed the pharmacy, and thought for a second about the one boy who had seen me—once—and I wondered if life were just a series of brush passes—things come and go.

  Then I heard a familiar voice say, “Cammie, is that you?”

  Then I realized that sometimes things come back.

  Josh.

  Josh was standing in front of me. Josh was stepping closer. Josh was looking at me, smiling at me. “Hey, Cammie, I thought that was you.”

  Now, I know I’m new to this whole ex-girlfriend thing, but I’m pretty sure exes aren’t supposed to talk to each other. In fact, I’m pretty sure exes are supposed to hide when they see each other, which totally sounded like a great idea to me, because, well, hiding’s what I do best.

  But Josh had seen me. Josh always saw me.

  “Cammie?” Josh said again. “Are you okay?”

  I honestly didn’t have a clue how to answer, because, on the one hand, Josh was there—talking to me! On the other hand, I had broken up with him. And lied to him. And the last time I’d seen him he’d shown up during a CoveOps exercise, driven a forklift through a wall, and had his memory modified, so okay wasn’t necessarily the word the came to mind when describing how I felt right then.

  Spies are good at multitasking—we observe and we process, we calculate and we lie, but I didn’t think it was possible to feel so happy, scared, and generally awkward all at the same time, so I muttered, “Hi, Josh,” and tried to keep my voice from cracking.

  “What are you doing here?” Josh asked, then looked up and down the narrow street as if he were being followed (which, when you think about it, wasn’t all that far-fetched).

  “Oh, it’s a . . . school thing.” At the word school, he recoiled slightly. I looked down at the uniform that—until that moment—Josh had never seen me wear. “So, how have you been?”

  “Okay. How about you?”

  “Okay,” I said, too, because, even though I could have told Josh a lot of things in a lot of different languages, the things I most wanted to say were the very things that neither the spy in me nor the girl in me could ever let him hear.

  “So we’re both okay,” Josh said. He forced a smile. “Good for us.”

  Oh my gosh, could this moment be any more awkward, I thought—just as . . . you guessed it . . . the moment got a lot more awkward.

  “Josh.” The voice was soft and familiar. “Josh, your dad said he could . . .” The voice trailed off, and I saw one of Josh’s oldest friends step out of the pharmacy’s side door.

  DeeDee’s short blond hair did a little flippy thing where it stuck out of the bottom of her pink hat. Which matched her pink scarf. And her pink mittens. Pink was definitely DeeDee’s signature color. “Oh my gosh, Cammie! It’s great to see you!” she exclaimed.

  She paused and studied my uniform for a second, as if remembering that almost everything I’d told her last semester had been a lie. And then, despite everything, DeeDee hugged me.

  “Hi, DeeDee,” I said, forcing a smile. “It’s really . . . good . . . to see you, too.” And it would have been if I hadn’t noticed something just then that had nothing to do with being a spy on a training op and everything to do with being an ex-girlfriend.

  DeeDee and Josh were standing too straight and trying too hard not to touch. A panicked look passed between them that screamed, We’ve been caught. And, Do you think she’ll know?

  It didn’t take a genius to look at them together—to know that Josh and DeeDee were no longer just friends.

  Spies don’t train so that we’ll always know what to think; we train so that in times like this we don’t have to think; so that our bodies will go on cruise control and do the right things for us. My mouth smiled. My lungs kept breathing. I maintained cover, even when I heard Mr. Solomon’s voice in my ear saying, “Okay, Ms. Morgan, let’s see you hand off.”

  “We’re . . . I mean . . . I’m . . .” DeeDee corrected quickly, as if trying to hide the fact that in the past few weeks she’d lost her single-pronoun status. “I’m on the committee for the spring fling—it’s a dance . . . and you know . . . kind of a big deal. . . .” She was rambling, unsteadied, which is pretty common for people in deep cover for the first time. “And Josh is helping me get businesses to donate door prizes and stuff. For the fling. Next Friday night. And—”

  She might have rambled on forever, and I might have let her, but then a voice echoed down the narrow street. “Cammie, there you are,” Zach said as he strolled around the corner, stopped suddenly, and looked from Josh to DeeDee and finally at me. “I was wondering where you’d disappeared to,” he said. Then he turned to the boy next to me, stretched out a hand, and said, “I’m Zach.”

  DeeDee looked at Zach then back to me, and smiled that all-American-girl smile of hers like this was the most superfun reunion ever!

  But Josh didn’t smile. He looked between Zach and me with the same kind of expression he used to have while doing his chemistry homework—as if the answer were right in front of him but he couldn’t quite see it.

  “Zach,” I said as my Culture and Assimi
lation training kicked in, “this is DeeDee. And Josh. They’re . . .” I started before I realized I had no idea how that sentence was supposed to end.

  “We’re friends of Cammie’s,” DeeDee said, saving me.

  “Zach and I . . .” I started, but then somehow couldn’t find the words to finish.

  “I go to school with Cammie,” Zach said, and I marveled for a moment about how smoothly he had lied, before I realized it wasn’t a lie at all.

  “Really?” DeeDee looked confused. “I thought it was a girls’ school?”

  “Actually, my school’s doing an exchange with Gallagher this semester.”

  Then (and I swear I’m not making this stuff up) Zach slipped his hand into mine!

  “Oh.” DeeDee’s eyes got wide as she looked at Zach, then at me, then at our joined hands. “That’s really great!” She beamed, and since DeeDee is about the most un-spylike girl I know, there wasn’t a doubt in my mind she was happy for me.

  I looked at Zach, trying to see him as DeeDee did. He was sort of tall, and his shoulders were pretty broad. I guess if you have to run into your ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend, then there are probably worse kinds of cover. (I know, because my mom told me a story once about the Privolzhsky region of Russia and a very unfortunate hat.) But that didn’t change the fact that I was finally with Josh again, but Josh . . . was with DeeDee. And I was holding the wrong boy’s hand.

  “Cam,” Zach said, and I realized it was the first time he’d actually called me by my name—not Gallagher Girl. It sounded . . . well . . . different. “The van’s leaving in ten.” He nodded at Josh and DeeDee. “It was nice meeting you.”

  “You too,” DeeDee said, but Josh didn’t make a sound as we watched Zach go. He’d already turned the corner by the dry cleaners before I realized he had taken the quarter with him.

  As little as I liked to admit it, Zachary Goode was officially it.

  “Oh . . . well . . . I’ll let you guys get back to your party plans,” I said as I stepped away.

  “You could come,” Josh called after me. I stopped. “Next Friday. You know, the whole town’s gonna be there. You could come if you want.”

  “And bring Zach,” DeeDee hurried to add.

  “That sounds like fun,” I said, except, if you asked me, a party with Josh and DeeDee and Zach sounded like the kind of torture that had been outlawed by the Geneva Convention. But of course I couldn’t say that. Of course I had to smile. And lie. Again.

  PROS AND CONS TO BEING A SPY WITH A BROKEN HEART:

  * * *

  PRO: Whenever you feel like punching someone, you can. As hard as you want. For credit.

  CON: The person you punch may very well punch you back. Harder. (Especially if that person is Bex.)

  PRO: High stone walls and state-of-the-art security greatly reduce the chance of seeing ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend in tremendously awkward social settings.

  CON: Advanced training means that your photographic memory is now so reliable that you’ll never be able to forget the sight of the happy couple together.

  PRO: You’re perfectly capable of putting all your old love letters and ticket stubs into a burn bag and hiding it really, really well.

  CON: Realizing that, despite everything, you can’t set the bag on fire. Not yet.

  PRO: Knowing that, no matter what the operation, you can always count on your friends.

  “We hate her,” Bex proclaimed that night as the four of us walked downstairs for supper.

  “No, guys, we don’t hate DeeDee,” I said.

  “Of course you can’t hate her—that would be petty,” Liz said in the manner of someone who had given it a great deal of thought. “But we can totally hate her.”

  That sounded great in theory, except . . . well . . . DeeDee wasn’t exactly easy to hate. I mean—she’s the kind of person who dots her I’s with little hearts (I know because we found a note from her in Josh’s trash last semester), and she wears pink mittens and invites her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend to parties even though she totally doesn’t have to. DeeDee was utterly un-hate-able. (And that’s what I despised most of all.)

  The corridors were virtually empty. Delicious aromas drifted from the Grand Hall as Macey McHenry placed one hand on the railing of the Grand Staircase, turned to me, and said, “We could hack into the DMV and set her up with a dozen unpaid parking tickets.”

  “Macey!” I cried.

  “It might make you feel better,” she rationalized. “It would make me feel better.”

  But I didn’t think anything could make me feel better right then, especially when we reached the marble floor of the foyer and Bex said, “You could go to that party and show him what he’s missing.”

  Really, going to that party was the last thing I needed, because A) I’d sort of promised under oath that I wouldn’t sneak off campus anymore. B) If I went I’d have to take Zach with me (like that was going to happen). And C) I didn’t have a thing in my closet that could possibly compete with pink mittens on the adorableness scale!

  I was just getting ready to point out those simple facts when I really heard what Bex had said.

  “Wait,” I said. “How did you know about the party?”

  “Cam,” Bex said softly, “you were on comms.”

  Oh. My. Gosh.

  As if it weren’t bad enough that I’d just had one of the most traumatic and heartbreaking conversations of my young life—I’d had it while wearing a comms unit!

  My classmates had heard everything. . . . Mr. Solomon had heard everything. . . . Dr. Steve had heard everything!

  That had been my chance to redeem myself in front of the Blackthorne Boys, and I had frozen. I, Cammie the Chameleon, had been seen . . . by my ex-boyfriend . . . and his new girlfriend . . . and I had frozen.

  It took all three of my roommates to drag me into the Grand Hall for supper. I barely managed to stay through dessert before slipping away. (Really, there’s no reason to waste perfectly good crème brûlée.)

  But then I found myself roaming dusty corridors that I know are rarely used, passing entrances to secret passageways and fighting the temptation to slip inside, until finally I was standing in a long, empty hall, staring at a tapestry of the Gallagher family tree, longing to ease behind it—to enter my all-time favorite secret passageway and disappear.

  And I might have, too, if I hadn’t heard a voice behind me.

  “You know, I don’t think I ever got the rest of my tour.”

  Zach. Zach was standing behind me. Zach was halfway down the corridor watching me, and I don’t know what was scarier, that I had been sloppy enough not to have heard him or that he was good enough not to have been heard.

  “So what do you say, Gallagher Girl?” He walked toward me then hooked one finger behind the ancient tapestry and peeked behind it. “Is this when I get my Cammie Morgan no-passageway-too-secret, no-wall-too-high tour?”

  “How do you know about . . .”

  He pointed to himself and said, “Spy.”

  Zach cocked his head and placed one shoulder against the cold stone wall, and suddenly I became acutely aware of the fact that we were . . .

  Alone.

  “So,” he said, “that was Jimmy?”

  “Josh,” I corrected.

  “Whatever,” Zach said, waving the detail away. “He’s a cutie.”

  And . . . well . . . Josh is a cutie, but I highly doubted that Zach meant it seriously, so I just rolled my eyes. “What do you want, Zach? If you came to make fun, go ahead,” I said, laying myself bare (or as bare as a girl can be in a government-approved school uniform). “Mock away.”

  He studied me for a long time, his face fighting a smile before saying, “Gee, you know, I would . . . but you just took the fun out of it.”

  “Sorry.”

  I took a quick step, but Zach blocked my path. “Hey,” he whispered. “Why’d you freeze out there today?” Suddenly he wasn’t the boy who had winked at me in D.C., and bore no resemblance to t
he guy who had sunned himself on the gazebo steps. So far I’d seen three different faces for Zachary Goode, and at the moment I didn’t have a clue which was real and which was legend.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I’m over it.”

  “No you aren’t, Gallagher Girl. But you will be.”

  Walking to my mother’s office on Sunday night, I couldn’t help wondering when it was all going to get easier. Josh wasn’t even my boyfriend anymore, yet my life was still full of boy-related drama. Hadn’t I spent a good portion of my winter break trying to put those things behind me? But that was before I knew that I’d stink at countersurveillance—that the drama would follow me wherever I went.

  A few minutes later Mom appeared in the doorway of her office. “How are you, kiddo?”

  “Fine.”

  But one of the downsides of having a top government operative for a mother is that, most of the time, she knows when you’re lying—even to yourself.

  “No,” Mom said. I heard the click of the door as it locked into place. “You’re not.”

  I could have told her it was nothing; I might have informed her that I was as fine as I could be, considering that Eva Alvarez had barged into our room at six a.m. in the morning (on a Sunday) asking to borrow Macey’s curling iron. But my mother knew better, so I just walked over to the leather sofa, sank into the soft cushions, and said, “I saw Josh.”

  And my mom said, “I know.”

  Of course I knew she’d know, because—well, she is a spy, and my headmistress, and there was probably a tape of the whole ordeal floating around somewhere. (Note to self: find and destroy that tape.) But right then Rachel Morgan was looking at me not as a spy, but as a mother. Maybe that’s why I had to look away.

  She sank to the couch beside me. “I know it may not seem like it, but this is a good thing, Cam. Seeing him was a good thing.”

  But it didn’t feel like a good thing.

  “The tea we gave Josh is quite effective, but sometimes certain triggers can cause people to remember the things we need them to forget. Josh has seen you. He’s talked to you. We know that he doesn’t remember following you on your CoveOps final. He has no recollection of coming back here and being debriefed. The Gallagher Academy is just an elite boarding school to him,” my mother said. “Josh is no longer a security threat.”